On Sun, Jan 23, 2005 at 12:46:40PM +1100, Mary Gardiner wrote: > On Sat, Jan 22, 2005, Matthew Palmer wrote: > > Since a WftD activity is supposed to be primarily about work > > experience and not about training, you couldn't spend a lot of time > > teaching the participants the skills of programming -- and considering > > that I know a lot of CompSci graduates who couldn't program their way > > out of a paper bag, I'm not sure that it's possible to teach a group > > of likely disinterested volunteers good programming practices in 15% > > of 2 days a week... > > I know the parent post was specifically about programming, but Sydney > LinuxChix actually also had this discussion amongst ourselves recently > too, and some of the meeting participants were much more interested in > doing non-coding Free Software volunteer work for their mutual > obligation requirements: documentation writing and editing and bug > reporting.
So you have a few more people who are interested in doing something along these lines? Sweet. Looks like there's definitely enough interest in this to get something going. I've been thinking about this pretty constantly since the initial mail on the subject (driving long distances is so good for the thought processes), and I came to much the same conclusions as Mary -- there's a lot more that can be done (and benefit a lot more people) than just cutting code. Documentation, user/functional testing and bug reporting, hell even bug confirmation would be a nice service. As a result of my thinking, I've come up with a bit of a plan... The organisation (a new one or a subproject of an existing group like ComputerBank or Linux Australia) provides work on F/OSS to mutual obligation people as well as anyone else who wants to volunteer (with a preference to MO people if there's not enough work to go around -- OK, stop laughing now). In particular, I've previously considered running a scheme essentially identical to this for CompSci and SoftEng students at the Uni of Wollongong to provide them with work experience before entering the workforce. We should also solicit donations of time from appropriate commercial organisations (software development places and technical writing houses are the first two that come to mind). Particularly, I can imagine that there will be a shortage of more experienced and project management personnel, and that's one area where getting people with current experience is pretty important. The benefit of involving commercial organisations is, apart from giving the volunteers access to knowledgable and experienced professionals in the field, that the volunteers also get exposure for possible job openings there. We all know that networking (not that sort) is the way to get jobs. I, for one, would happily volunteer my time as a project leader / manager for a project or two. The work would come from two main sources -- random F/OSS projects that happen to look sexy, but also from community and NFP organisations that need software or websites or whatever written. Since my experience with ComputerBank has taught me that even NFPs need a revenue stream, my thought was to charge a nominal fee for specified work done for community groups and such. This covers administration expenses and whatnot and, if things get going well enough, could pay for some form of premises to ply our trade. Naturally, it would be a condition of all contracts that all work product be released under a Free licence. The benefits for the volunteers are many -- their name on some work, experience doing things The Commercial Way, contacts, references, getting to keep their NewStart payments (grin), and so on. The benefits for F/OSS are really exciting, too. Not only does the Community get more Free Software written, but a whole pile of IT types who might not have had much exposure to F/OSS otherwise get dropped right into it, and learn (in the best possible way) what F/OSS is all about. These people, even if they then proceed into traditional MS shops, will have been indoctrinated to the benefits of our way of doing things, and will (hopefully) go forth and become evangelists for Free Software. I propose the name "Community Code" for the project. The fact that I registered 'communitycode.org' when I got home to host some resources for my vision of things (before reading my SLUG list e-mail) has nothing to do with my preference for that name... <grin> - Matt
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